Study on Available Cloud Manufacturing Platforms for CNC Milling Processes

Abstract

CNC milling processes represent the main group of production processes for components with a non-trivial surface geometry that are either brittle or have a material with a high melting point or have sensitive requirements for the manufacturing tolerances. Thus, a study was conducted on the adoption of CNC milling processes in the cloud manufacturing segment, highlighting the range of functions provided as well as the unit prices. In the process, multiple application scenarios were addressed via part enquiries to be manufactured, which have different technical requirements for the CNC milling machine cell to be manufactured. Thus, components were designed that require at least three, four, or five synchronous axes for production. In addition, components with geometric properties were added that can be realized either on a 4-axis system or on a 3-axis system with a reclaiming process. For the evaluation, 50 platform providers were researched via a structured search, which were filtered through an automated ordering process, accessibility, and available materials to a final eleven platforms to be evaluated. On these platforms, a total of 55 application scenarios were then compared in terms of their performance with the application of 22 evaluation criteria. After a weighted evaluation of the results, recommendations were made for component requests from identified groups in terms of geometry complexity, material, and number of pieces that resulted from the analysis.